Martyr (2 page)

The highway cut a straight line through the fields, sharp and bleak as a razor. Their camp was still a dark blur on the horizon, a few miles and a few hours away. It wavered like a mirage in the rain, a smear of black-inked buildings on pale grey paper. Every step toward the city was a tick against Tenn's nerves. The creaking cart was too loud, the rain too deep. There was no way they could walk fast enough for his comfort. He just wanted to be back and dry and warm, preferably with Jarrett, preferably pretending they weren't waiting for battle.

Denial had never served him well, but out here in the freezing cold with no comfort from the Spheres, it was better than reality.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he barely noticed Katherine stop. She didn't say anything, just stood there with her eyes wide and a slight part to her lips. There wasn't time to ask what she was searching for.

A second later, he heard it. A howl. A scream. It sliced through the fields like a scalpel, high-pitched and dragged from the depths of Hell.

No living thing could make that noise. Apparently the fields weren't as abandoned as he'd hoped.

“Shit,” they whispered in unison.

The sound came from their left. Tenn shielded his eyes and tried to see further out, but through the rain and the haze, all he could see was shifting grey. The fields had grown high enough to be hiding anything. His only consolation was that the scream sounded distant.

Michael lowered the cart handles to the ground, slowly, gently, making sure not a sound or creak was made. When he stood, his mace was already unbuckled and held ready in one hand. Tenn looked over to Katherine, who quickly pulled her hair into a ponytail and unsheathed her katanas. His fingers were white-knuckled on his staff.

“Stay very, very still,” he whispered. “Maybe they'll pass us by.”

“Not likely,” Michael muttered, but he held his position.

Seconds passed in silence. Each raindrop froze into his skin, each heartbeat promised devastation.

There was a chance—a small chance—that it was a single kraven. Just one lowly, lonely monster seeking its next meal. And there was a small chance that the kraven had found the deer's head, taken the bait, and was on the run for fear its brothers would discover the bounty. It was a small chance. Luck was a devilish mistress.

Silence stretched across Tenn's nerves like a noose. Blood pooled against his gums from a fresh-bit wound in his cheek. He tried to relax his jaw, tried to breathe slow and deep. At least thirty seconds had passed, right? They would have known if they were spotted by now. He took another deep breath and started to relax his grip.

A second howl split the world, closer this time. And this one wasn't alone. Another voice picked it up, high and piercing as shattering glass and nails on a chalkboard. It rang in his ears like a death knell. Now he was certain the fields weren't just moving from the storm. They were surrounded. He knew the scream of a kraven like he knew his own voice, but that wasn't to say there weren't other types of Howls out there. The quiet ones were often the deadliest. Without magic or a clear line of sight, he also had no way to estimate how many there were. Could be dozens. Hundreds.

It didn't matter.

Without magic, even a handful of kravens could be deadly. He crouched down, brushed his fingers atop the cold asphalt. Blood thundered in his ears, louder than the rain. He counted his heartbeats in the back of his mind, wondering how many more he had left before his blood stilled. The Sphere of Water roiled in his gut. It could sense the upcoming battle, could feel it in the pulse of the rain—so much water was about to be shed, and his Sphere yearned to be a part of it.

“Hold them off as long as you can,” he said.

“We're going to die,” Katherine replied. Her voice was too calm for comfort. Like him, she had faced death a hundred times, and each time had probably felt as final as this. Unlike him, she seemed okay with it. “There are too many.”

“You know the orders,” Tenn said. His eyes flickered to his right arm, to the tattoo he could practically feel burning against his skin.
No magic. Even if the orders get us killed
.

She didn't say anything in reply, but he could imagine her nodding her head and accepting her own approaching demise. He wasn't willing to give up so easily. There were still too many lost souls on his conscience to avenge. Somehow, he was going to make it out of this alive. He'd promised Jarrett as much.

Then the first kraven broke through the field with a banshee's scream, and all thoughts vanished in the heat of survival.

Like all the variations of Howls, kravens had been human once, though the resemblance was sparse—two legs, two arms, a torso and head. But the conversion process twisted the host into something beyond nightmare. Bones jutted from rotting grey flesh like talons. The beast's spine curved and twisted it into a hunched monstrosity. Its eyes were bloodshot, red as meat, and its jaw had snapped and reformed like the maw of a piranha in a bulbous human head. The very sight should have been enough to send a sane man running. None of them moved. One kraven was nothing.

More monsters leaped from the fields, scuttling toward them like spiders with snapping joints and slathering jaws. The fields swarmed with Howls, a tide of demons starved for flesh. When the first kraven reached the road, Katherine ran forward, her blades a whirl of silver in her hands.

When he was younger, Tenn had immersed himself in stories of heroes and battle. The tales were always gorgeous in a way—heart-pumping and engaging, filled with quick moves and dancing blows. The Resurrection taught him that all those books were full of shit.

Real battle wasn't pretty. You trained to block and parry and dodge, yes, but you didn't think about it, didn't focus on long dancing combinations of moves. You swung. You screamed a lot. You killed as fast as you could and didn't think about anything but the feel of flesh giving way under your hands. And if you were even a hairsbreadth too slow, if today just wasn't your day, you were never, ever heard from again.

He gritted his teeth and prayed today wasn't that day.

He lunged forward, meeting a kraven mid-leap and slicing its body right through the gut. Cold black blood sprayed out, but Tenn was already slashing another kraven before the first corpse fell. Michael was just out of sight beside him, grunting and yelling, the skull-shattering cracks of his mace rolling across the fields like thunder.

But more monsters were coming. The field was thick with beasts, the air alive and hellish with their screams. A shadow darted behind him. He turned just in time to parry the slash of a cleaver. He barely had time to register the opponent—male, shirtless, drenched in blood and whiter than snow—before counterattacking. The man's head fell to the ground with a wet smack.

“Bloodlings!” he yelled, but even though he screamed it at the top of his lungs, he knew his companions hadn't heard. The world was a living, grinding thing of scarred flesh and teeth and talons, and everywhere he turned he was slashing, dodging, trying to stay alive as the grey tide overtook him. His breath was fire as he fought, as he hacked and screamed his way through the melee. Seconds felt like an eternity, and the damage done to him and his foes was immense. A thousand cuts burned across his skin. A thousand moments he was too slow. A thousand instances he could have died, and a thousand reasons he still might.

A yell broke through the din—masculine, enraged, and in pain. Then Michael's voice cut short in a gurgle. Tenn spared a glance over but couldn't see anything through the kravens scrambling over corpses. Katherine screamed as well, but whether from rage or pain, he wasn't certain. That's when he realized, in the far-off corner of his mind, that he was going to die. They all were.

His arm went numb from a kraven's bite. His hands were drenched red. And still, the monsters came.

Jarrett's voice drifted through his mind as he fell to his knees:
Don't use magic, not under any circumstances. We can't give ourselves away
.

Water and blood seeped through Tenn's jeans, his numb hand limp at his side. He could only stare at the blood and wonder at how quickly this had come, his end. At how easy it was to die. Pain seared across his back as a Howl ripped through his flesh. Blood was everywhere—black blood, red blood, red rain. Water screamed inside of him as his blood spilled forth. Memories rode the current—flashes of his mother and father the last time he saw them, Jarrett's hand in his, and a song, his mother's voice, a lullaby he couldn't place. His eyes fluttered. His working hand dropped his staff.

This is how it feels to die, and I will be eaten before they find my corpse
.

And as another kraven lunged for the kill, mouth wide and broken teeth bared, the Sphere of Water did something it should not have been able to do—it opened unbidden in Tenn's stomach.

Power flooded him, rushed through in a whirlpool of memory and pain, filled every pulse with a thousand freezing agonies, a million regrets that dragged him down, down, down into the pits of his every despair.

The Sphere connected him to the element without, to the rain hammering from the sky and the blood pooling on the ground and the pulse in every vein of every creature within a mile. He could feel it, all of it, the agonizing tide slowly seeping toward death's shore. He felt Katherine a few yards away, her heart throbbing so fast it hurt his own. He felt the kravens, all of them, and in that split second, he wrapped his fingers deep into the torrent of power and screamed.

The rain shivered. Changed. He twisted the power and twisted the elements and felt his past scream in his ears as raindrops became ice, became shards sharper than glass, became hammers that lashed from the sky with sickening velocity. His Sphere raged in joy and agony as its power unleashed, as the bloodlust filled his darkening vision and screams filled the air. Blades of ice met flesh, sliced through skin and bone. Ice spilled forth blood, and Water rejoiced as the world drenched itself in crimson agony. Power ran through his veins, and this power craved revenge.

In seconds, it was over. He felt the Howls die, all of them—felt their blood leave their bodies and pool against the sodden earth. He curled on the ground, frozen, sobbing, and forced the power away, forced his Sphere back to silence. The magic closed, but the memories seethed. Those screams would never die down. They echoed in his emptiness, chained him down and dragged him through the dark.

Nothing moved in the world.

Just the rain.

Just his breath.

Just his blood mixing with the dead.

2

He
didn't know how long he lay there. The wind and rain were a constant roar, but their sound was distant compared to the throb of blood in his ears. He couldn't open his eyes against the screams of memories raging in his head.

An empty house, lines of blood streaking the halls. The bedroom door, perfectly clean. It opened under his fingertips with a slow, forbidding creak. Inside, everything was pristine. His skin crawled with the emptiness. Mom? Dad? Where are you?

Something brushed his cheek. Frayed nerves snapped into life, and his eyes fluttered open.

Katherine knelt above him. Blood stained her skin, and long gashes webbed across her in leaking lines.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was angelic, if only because he had been certain he'd killed her.

Tenn could only nod.

“You're bleeding,” she said. “Badly.”

He took a deep, shaky breath and forced himself to sitting. His bones screamed in defiance. He was covered in cuts and bruises, some gashes most likely fatal if he didn't act fast. Her wounds were just as bad.

“So are you,” he managed.

“You've already broken orders,” she said, without the slightest hint of sarcasm. “We might as well live to face Jarrett's wrath.”

He nodded.

Then he closed his eyes and pushed deep into the pit of his pelvis, to the place where the Sphere of Earth rested. It was the second and last Sphere he'd been attuned to. He coaxed it awake and sank his focus into the rich soil of it, to the heavy power that rooted him to the earth. Energy filled him with green light, with the warm, calming sap of gravity and flesh. When he opened his eyes, he could still see the light vining through his pelvis. He reached out and placed his hands on Katherine's arm, feeling every cut and injury in her body. With the gentlest of touches, he pushed the energy through her and began to heal her wounds.

She winced as flesh knitted itself back together. If his connection to Earth had taught him anything, it was that dying was easy; healing was the painful part. When her wounds had closed, he turned his attention to himself. Arcs of fire lanced across his skin. He didn't grimace. This pain, this physical hurt, couldn't hold a candle to the hell that Water dragged him through. An old Monty Python quote flitted through his mind, and he had to force down a manic chuckle:
“It's just a flesh wound.”

His stomach rumbled and his limbs shook the moment he closed off to Earth. It felt like he hadn't eaten in weeks. That was the main drawback of Earth—when it filled you, it made you feel invincible. The moment it left, you were reminded just how weak your body truly was.

Tenn forced himself to standing, using his staff as a crutch. Katherine was either too preoccupied or too polite to try and help him up.

“Michael?” he asked.

She just shook her head and continued looking off into the distance. The rain hid whatever tears she might be shedding. He bit back an apology; apologies wouldn't bring the guy back. Idiot or no, he had still been their companion. He was still important.

For a while, they stood there, looking out over the massacre. The field was covered in grey corpses, blood pooling like an oil spill. Even through the deluge, the scent of death and decay was thick in the air, cloying and coating his lungs. Michael was probably underneath the bodies somewhere. It didn't seem right. He deserved a better burial.